SsangYong — Twin Dragons

The East Asian dragon is not the European one, and conflating them costs you the entire point.

A European dragon is a lizard: bulky, winged, quadrupedal, fire-producing, hostile, and reliably killed in the third act. An East Asian dragon — 龍, yong, ryū, long — is a serpent. Long-bodied, limbed but not built around those limbs, scaled, associated with water and rain rather than fire, generally benevolent, and frequently in charge of rivers. It moves like a snake. It is drawn like a snake. It is, structurally, a snake that has been granted authority.

SsangYong Motor Company therefore carried, in its actual legal name, two of them.

What it built with that name was a range of four-wheel-drive vehicles, some of them excellent, several of them styled in a manner that the Ophidiary will describe only as courageous. The Rodius in particular was a vehicle about which strong opinions were formed instantly and held for life.

And this is what makes the entry worth writing. The Alfa Romeo biscione is legible; you can see it on the grille. SsangYong’s serpents were encoded in a name that most of its export markets could not read, and so for three and a half decades a pair of dragons sat entirely undetected on the tailgate of every SsangYong sold in Europe — camouflage so complete that it required no effort at all.

Snakes are extremely good at this. The great majority of snake encounters do not happen, because the snake was there, and you were there, and nothing about the situation announced itself.

In 2023 the company was renamed KG Mobility following its acquisition, and the twin dragons left the badge. They had been sitting in plain sight since 1988 and almost nobody had said hello.